The symbol derives from a capital "L", representing libra, the basic unit of weight in the Roman Empire, which in turn is derived from the Latin name of the same spelling for scales or a balance. The pound became an English unit of weight and was so named because it originally had the value of one tower pound (~350 grams) of fine (pure) silver. According to the Royal Mint Museum:[1]

It is not known for certain when the horizontal line or lines, which indicate an abbreviation, first came to be drawn through the L. However, there is in the Bank of England Museum a cheque dated 7 January 1661 with a clearly discernible £ sign. By the time the Bank was founded in 1694 the £ sign was in common use.

The pound sign is placed before the number (e.g. "£12,000") and separated from the following digits by no space or only a thin space.

The symbol ₤ (note the double dash at its middle) was called the lira sign in Italy, before the adoption of the euro. It was used (in free variation with £) as an alternative to the more usual L. or Lit. to show prices in lire. It was also used unofficially as the symbol of the Maltese lira instead of the official Lm.

In American English, the term "pound sign" usually refers to the symbol #, and the corresponding telephone key is called the "pound key".[2] The symbols £ and # are both referred to as the pound sign in Canadian English (# is also referred to as the "number sign" and "noughts-and-crosses board").[3]

In the eighteenth-century Caslon metal fonts, the pound sign was identical to the italic capital "J" rotated 180 degrees.[4]

Unicode notes that the "lira sign" is not widely used,[6] and also claim that the preferred sign for lira is the pound sign.[6]

Some fonts render the pound sign with a double bar (for example on a previous version of the British five pound note);[7] this is simply a different glyph, and the underlying character (and therefore Unicode codepoint) is still a pound sign, and not a lira sign.

Typewriters produced for the British market included a "£" sign from the earliest days, though its position varied widely. A 1921 advertisement for an Imperial Typewriters model D, for example[8] shows a machine with two modifier shifts (CAPS and FIG), with the "£" sign occupying the FIG shift position on the key for letter "B". But the advertisement notes that "We make special keyboards containing symbols, fractions, signs, etc., for the peculiar needs of Engineers, Builders, Architects, Chemists, Scientists, etc., or any staple trade."

On Latin-alphabet typewriters lacking a "£" symbol type element, a reasonable approximation could be made by typing an "f" over an "L".

In the punched card era, equipment sold for commercial data processing in the UK needed not only to represent the pound sign, but also to handle pre-decimal currency (pounds, shillings, and pence, including halfpennies and farthings). Encodings for the necessary symbols varied by manufacturer. By the time of decimalisation in 1971, national variants of character codes were already well established and naturally found their way into early computers.

In the computer age, prior to the introduction of 8-bit character sets in the early 1980s, the most common character code in use in the UK was the UK national variant of ISO 646, standardised as BS 4730. This code was identical to ASCII except by the substitution of two characters: x23 became "£" in place of "#", while x7E became "‾" in place of "~". Keyboards (then as now) were manufactured with different key engravings for different national markets; and printers were manufactured to support a variety of national variants of ISO 646, selectable by hardware or software configuration options.

ICL's 1900-series mainframes, used by many UK installations at the time, used a different convention, in which x24 became "£" in place of "$".

The 1980s saw the gradual adoption of 8-bit character sets designed to meet the needs of all Western European languages in a single character set: ISO/IEC 8859-1 was standardised in 1985, based on the character code used in the popular Digital Equipment CorporationVT220 terminal. This code had "£" in position xA3 (which is where it remains in Unicode). The IBM PC originally used a non-standard 8-bit character set Code page 437 in which the "£" character was encoded as x9C; adoption of ISO character codes only came later with Microsoft Windows (introduced under the misnomer "ANSI", because it was ANSI that published international standards in the United States).

Other early personal computers also adopted their own solutions. The Commodore 64 computer included a dedicated key for the pound sign (to the right of the number row). The BBC Micro used a variant of ASCII that replaced the backtick ("`", character 96, hex 60) with the pound sign, denoted as CHR$96 or (hex) CHR$&60. Since the BBC Micro used a Teletext mode as standard, this means that the pound sign is in the 7-bit ASCII variant used on Teletext systems such as Ceefax, ORACLE and Teletext Ltd as well.

In the 1980s, the two main standards for the print codes for a pound sign were ASCII 186 for the HP Laserjet and ASCII 156 for most other printers including the IBM Quietwriter and Epson dot matrix printers. In order to print a pound sign, each word processor needed to be set up individually to print the sign for a particular printer. For many word processors a terminate and stay resident program (TSR) was needed to convert the code generated by the package into the right code for the printer. Packages such as WordPerfect had utilities to set up this conversion without needing a TSR.

1.
Pound (mass)
–
The pound or pound-mass is a unit of mass used in the imperial, United States customary and other systems of measurement. The international standard symbol for the pound is lb. The unit is descended from the Roman libra, the English word pound is cognate with, among others, German Pfund, Dutch pond, and Swedish pund. All ultimately derive from a borrowing into Proto-Germanic of the Latin expression lībra pondō, usage of the unqualified term pound reflects the historical conflation of mass and weight. This accounts for the modern distinguishing terms pound-mass and pound-force, the United States and countries of the Commonwealth of Nations agreed upon common definitions for the pound and the yard. Since 1 July 1959, the avoirdupois pound has been defined as exactly 0.45359237 kg. In the United Kingdom, the use of the pound was implemented in the Weights and Measures Act 1963.9144 metre exactly. An avoirdupois pound is equal to 16 avoirdupois ounces and to exactly 7,000 grains, the conversion factor between the kilogram and the international pound was therefore chosen to be divisible by 7, and an grain is thus equal to exactly 64.79891 milligrams. The US has not adopted the system despite many efforts to do so. Historically, in different parts of the world, at different points in time, and for different applications, the libra is an ancient Roman unit of mass that was equivalent to approximately 328.9 grams. It was divided into 12 unciae, or ounces, the libra is the origin of the abbreviation for pound, lb. A number of different definitions of the pound have historically used in Britain. Amongst these were the avoirdupois pound and the tower, merchants. Historically, the sterling was a tower pound of silver. In 1528, the standard was changed to the Troy pound, the avoirdupois pound, also known as the wool pound, first came into general use c. It was initially equal to 6992 troy grains, the pound avoirdupois was divided into 16 ounces. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the pound was redefined as 7,000 troy grains. Since then, the grain has often been a part of the avoirdupois system

2.
Apostrophe
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The apostrophe character is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English it is used for several purposes, The marking of the omission of one or more letters, the marking of plurals of individual characters. Apostrophe comes ultimately from Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος, through Latin and French, the apostrophe looks the same as a closing single quotation mark, although they have different meanings. Such incorrect substitutes as ´ and are common in unprofessional texts, the apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of De Aetna. It was introduced into English in the 16th century in imitation of French practice, introduced by Geoffroy Tory, the apostrophe was used in place of a vowel letter to indicate elision. It was also used in place of a final e when it was elided before a vowel. Modern French orthography has restored the spelling une heure, from the 16th century, following French practice, the apostrophe was used when a vowel letter was omitted either because of incidental elision or because the letter no longer represented a sound. English spelling retained many inflections that were not pronounced as syllables, notably verb endings and the noun ending -es, so apostrophe followed by s was often used to mark a plural, especially when the noun was a loan word. The use of elision has continued to the present day, but significant changes have made to the possessive. By the 18th century, apostrophe + s was used for all possessive singular forms. This was regarded as representing the Old English genitive singular inflection -es, the plural use was greatly reduced, but a need was felt to mark possessive plural. The solution was to use an apostrophe after the plural s, however, this was not universally accepted until the mid-19th century. The apostrophe is used to indicate possession and this convention distinguishes possessive singular forms from simple plural forms, and both of those from possessive plural forms. For singulars, the possessive or genitive inflection is a survival from certain genitive inflections in Old English. Summary of rules for most situations Possessive personal pronouns, serving as either noun-equivalents or adjective-equivalents, do not use an apostrophe, even when they end in s. The complete list of those ending in the s or the corresponding sound /s/ or /z/ but not taking an apostrophe is ours, yours, his, hers, its, theirs. Other pronouns, singular nouns not ending in s, and plural nouns not ending in s all take ’s in the possessive, e. g. someone’s, a cat’s toys, women’s. Plural nouns already ending in s take only an apostrophe after the s when the possessive is formed

3.
Bracket
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A bracket is a tall punctuation mark typically used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. The matched pair may be described as opening and closing, or left, forms include round, square, curly, and angle brackets, and various other pairs of symbols. Chevrons were the earliest type of bracket to appear in written English, desiderius Erasmus coined the term lunula to refer to the rounded parentheses, recalling the shape of the crescent moon. Some of the names are regional or contextual. Sometimes referred to as angle brackets, in cases as HTML markup. Occasionally known as broken brackets or brokets, ⸤ ⸥, ｢ ｣ – corner brackets ⟦ ⟧ – double square brackets, white square brackets Guillemets, ‹ › and « », are sometimes referred to as chevrons or angle brackets. The characters ‹ › and « », known as guillemets or angular quote brackets, are actually quotation mark glyphs used in several European languages, which one of each pair is the opening quote mark and which is the closing quote varies between languages. In English, typographers generally prefer to not set brackets in italics, however, in other languages like German, if brackets enclose text in italics, they are usually set in italics too. Parentheses /pəˈrɛnθᵻsiːz/ contain material that serves to clarify or is aside from the main point, a milder effect may be obtained by using a pair of commas as the delimiter, though if the sentence contains commas for other purposes, visual confusion may result. In American usage, parentheses are considered separate from other brackets. Parentheses may be used in writing to add supplementary information. They can also indicate shorthand for either singular or plural for nouns and it can also be used for gender neutral language, especially in languages with grammatical gender, e. g. he agreed with his physician. Parenthetical phrases have been used extensively in informal writing and stream of consciousness literature, examples include the southern American author William Faulkner as well as poet E. E. Cummings. Parentheses have historically been used where the dash is used in alternatives, such as parenthesis) is used to indicate an interval from a to c that is inclusive of a. That is, [5, 12) would be the set of all numbers between 5 and 12, including 5 but not 12. The numbers may come as close as they like to 12, including 11.999 and so forth, in some European countries, the notation [5, 12[ is also used for this. The endpoint adjoining the bracket is known as closed, whereas the endpoint adjoining the parenthesis is known as open, if both types of brackets are the same, the entire interval may be referred to as closed or open as appropriate. Whenever +∞ or −∞ is used as an endpoint, it is considered open

4.
Dash
–
The dash is a punctuation mark that is similar to a hyphen or minus sign, but differs from both of these symbols primarily in length and function. Glitter, felt, yarn, and buttons—his kitchen looked as if a clown had exploded, a flock of sparrows—some of them juveniles—alighted and sang. The en dash indicates spans or differentiation, where it may be considered to replace and or to, The French and Indian War was fought in western Pennsylvania and along the present US–Canada border. —Mahatma Gandhi There are several forms of dash, of which the most common are, Less common are the dash and three-em dash. The figure dash is so named because it is the width as a digit. This is true of most fonts, not only monospaced fonts, the figure dash is used when a dash must be used within numbers. It does not indicate a range, for which the en dash is used, nor does it function as the minus sign, the figure dash is often unavailable, in this case, one may use a hyphen-minus instead. In Unicode, the dash is U+2012. HTML authors must use the numeric forms &#8210, or &#x2012, to type it unless the file is in Unicode, there is no equivalent character entity. In TeX, the fonts have no figure dash, however. In XeLaTeX, one could use \char2012, the en dash, n dash, n-rule, or nut is traditionally half the width of an em dash. In modern fonts, the length of the en dash is not standardized, the widths of en and em dashes have also been specified as being equal to those of the upper-case letters N and M respectively, and at other times to the widths of the lower-case letters. This may include such as those between dates, times, or numbers. Various style guides restrict this range indication style to only parenthetical or tabular matter, for example, APA style uses an en dash in ranges, but AMA style uses a hyphen. Various style guides recommend that when a number range might be misconstrued as subtraction, the word to should be used instead of an en dash. For example, a voltage of 50 V to 100 V is preferable to using a voltage of 50–100 V. Relatedly, in ranges that include negative numbers, to is used to avoid ambiguity or awkwardness. It is also considered poor style to use the en dash in place of the words to or and in phrases that follow the forms from X to Y, the en dash can also be used to contrast values, or illustrate a relationship between two things. Examples of this include, Australia beat American Samoa 31–0

5.
Exclamation mark
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The exclamation mark or exclamation point is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or high volume, and often marks the end of a sentence. Similarly, an exclamation mark is often used in warning signs. Other uses include, In mathematics it denotes the factorial operation, at the beginning of an expression to denote logical negation, e. g. A means the logical negation of A, also called not A. Graphically the exclamation mark is represented as a stop point with a vertical line above. One theory of its origin is that it is derived from a Latin exclamation of joy, the modern graphical representation is believed to have been born in the Middle Ages. Medieval copyists wrote the Latin word io at the end of a sentence to indicate joy, over time, the i moved above the o, and the o became smaller, becoming a point. The exclamation mark did not have its own dedicated key on standard manual typewriters before the 1970s, instead, one typed a period, backspaced, and typed an apostrophe. In the 1950s, secretarial dictation and typesetting manuals in America referred to the mark as bang, appeared in dialogue balloons to represent a gun being fired, although the nickname probably emerged from letterpress printing. This bang usage is behind the names of the interrobang, an unconventional character, and a shebang line. In the printing world, the mark can be called a screamer, a gasper. In hacker culture, the mark is called bang, shriek, or, in the British slang known as Commonwealth Hackish. For example, the password communicated in the spoken phrase Your password is em-nought-pee-aitch-pling-en-three is m0ph. n3, the exclamation mark is common to languages using the Latin alphabet, although usage varies slightly between languages. The exclamation mark was adopted in languages written in other scripts, such as Greek, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Devanagari. A sentence ending in an exclamation mark may be an exclamation, or an imperative, or may indicate astonishment or surprise, They were the footprints of a gigantic hound. Exclamation marks are occasionally placed mid-sentence with a similar to a comma, for dramatic effect, although this usage is obsolescent, On the walk. Informally, exclamation marks may be repeated for emphasis. The exclamation mark is used in conjunction with the question mark. This can be in protest or astonishment, a few writers replace this with a single, nonstandard punctuation mark, the interrobang, which is the combination of a question mark and an exclamation mark

6.
Question mark
–
The question mark is a punctuation mark that indicates an interrogative clause or phrase in many languages. The question mark is not used for indirect questions, the question mark glyph is also often used in place of missing or unknown data. In Unicode, it is encoded at U+003F, lynne Truss attributes an early form of the modern question mark in western language to Alcuin of York. Truss describes the punctus interrogativus of the late 8th century as and this earliest question mark was a decoration of one of these dots, with the lightning flash perhaps meant to denote intonation, and perhaps associated with early musical notation like neumes. It has also suggested that the glyph derives from the Latin quaestiō, meaning question. The lowercase q was written above the o, and this mark was transformed into the modern symbol. According to a 2011 discovery by a Cambridge manuscript expert, Syriac was the first language to use a mark to indicate an interrogative sentence. The Syriac question mark has the form of a double dot. In English, the question mark typically occurs at the end of a sentence, however, the question mark may also occur at the end of a clause or phrase, where it replaces the comma, Is it good in form. Or, Showing off for him, for all of them, what did he have to be hubrid about. —but from mood and nervousness. This is quite common in Spanish, where the use of bracketing question marks explicitly indicates the scope of interrogation, en el caso de que no puedas ir con ellos, ¿quieres ir con nosotros. In Spanish, since the edition of the Ortografía of the Royal Academy in 1754. An interrogative sentence, clause, or phrase begins with a question mark ⟨¿⟩ and ends with the question mark ⟨. ⟩, as in, Ella me pregunta «¿qué hora es. » – She asks me. The one exception is when the mark is matched with an exclamation mark, as in. – Who do you think you are, nonetheless, even here the Academy recommends matching punctuation, ¡¿Quién te has creído que eres. Other languages of Spain, Catalan and Galician also uses the opening question mark though usually only in long sentences or in cases which would otherwise be ambiguous. Basque only use one question mark, in Armenian the question mark takes the form of an open circle and is placed over the last vowel of the question word. It is defined in Unicode at U+055E ՞ ARMENIAN QUESTION MARK, the Greek question mark appeared around the same time as the Latin one, in the 8th century

7.
Quotation mark
–
The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same character. Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media, the double quotation mark is older than the single. By the middle sixteenth century, printers had developed a form of this notation. In most other languages, including English, the marginal marks dropped out of use in the last years of the eighteenth century, the usage of a pair of marks, closing and opening, at the level of lower case letters was generalized. By the nineteenth century, the design and usage began to be specific within each region, in Western Europe the usage became to use the quotation marks in pairs but “pointing” outside. In Britain those marks were elevated to the height of the top of capital letters. In France, by the end of the century those marks were modified to a more angular shape. Some authors claim that the reason for this was a one, in order to get a character that was clearly distinguishable from the apostrophes, the commas. Other authors claim that the reason for this was an aesthetical one, nevertheless, while other languages do not insert a space between the quotation marks and the word, the French usage does insert them, even if it is a narrow space. The curved quotation marks usage was exported to some non-Latin scripts, the angular quotation marks usage was exported to some non-Latin scripts, like Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Ethiopic. The Far East angle brackets quotation marks are also a development of the angular quotation marks. In Central Europe, however, the practice was to use the marks in pairs. The German tradition preferred the curved quotation marks, the first one at the level of the commas, alternatively, these marks still “pointed” inside but could be angular and in-line with lower case letters. Some neighboring regions adopted the German tradition but some adopted the second mark as “pointing” to the right. In Sweden, both marks “pointed” to the right but both were at the top level, neither at the bottom, in Eastern Europe there was a hesitation between the French tradition and the German tradition. The single quotation mark emerged around 1800 as a means of indicating a level of quotation. One could expect that the logic would be the corresponding single mark everywhere, British English tends to reverse the usage — single quotation marks are primary, and double quotation marks are secondary —this distinction, however, dating back to around the 1960s. In some languages using the quotation marks, the usage of single ones became obsolete, being replaced by double curved ones

8.
Semicolon
–
The semicolon or semi-colon is a punctuation mark that separates major sentence elements. A semicolon can be used two closely related independent clauses, provided they are not already joined by a coordinating conjunction. Semicolons can also be used in place of commas to separate items in a list, the first printed semicolon was the work of the Italian printer Aldus Manutius the Elder in 1494. Manutius established the practice of using the semicolon to separate words of opposed meaning, ben Jonson was the first notable English writer to use the semicolon systematically. The modern uses of the semicolon relate either to the listing of items or to the linking of related clauses, in Unicode it is encoded at U+003B, Semicolon. Although terminal marks mark the end of a sentence, the comma, semicolon and colon are normally sentence internal, the semicolon falls between terminal marks and the comma, its strength is equal to that of the colon. When a semicolon marks the boundary of a constituent, the right boundary is marked by punctuation of equal or greater strength. When two or more semicolons are used within a construction, all constituents are at the same level, unlike commas. Semicolons are followed by a lower case letter, unless that letter would ordinarily be capitalized mid-sentence, modern style guides recommend no space before them and one space after. They also typically recommend placing semicolons outside ending quotation marks, although this was not always the case, for example, the first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style recommended placing the semicolon inside ending quotation marks. Several fast food restaurants can be found within the cities, London, England, Paris, France, Dublin, Ireland, Madrid. Here are three examples of sequences, one, two, and three, a, b, and c, first, second, and third. Between closely related independent clauses not conjoined with a coordinating conjunction, I went to the basketball court, I was told it was closed for cleaning. I told Kate shes running for the hills, I wonder if she knew I was joking, either clause may include commas, this is especially common when parallel wording is omitted from the second, Ted has two dogs, Sam, one. When a comma replaces a period in a quotation, or when a quotation otherwise links two independent sentences, I have no use for this, he said, you are welcome to it and she asked, I found it on the floor. In Arabic, the semicolon is called Fāṣila Manqūṭa which means literally a dotted comma, in Arabic, the semicolon has several uses, It can be used between two phrases, in which the first phrase causes the second. Example, He played much, so, his clothes became dirty and it can be used in two phrases, where the second is a reason for the first. Example, Your sister did not get high marks, because she didnt study, in Greek and Church Slavonic, a semicolon indicates a question, similar to a Latin question mark

9.
Word divider
–
In punctuation, a word divider is a glyph that separates written words. However, many languages of East Asia are written without word separation, in character encoding, word segmentation depends on which characters are defined as word dividers. In Ancient Egyptian, determinatives may have used as much to demarcate word boundaries as to disambiguate the semantics of words. Rarely in Assyrian cuneiform, but commonly in the later cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet, in Old Persian cuneiform, a diagonally sloping wedge was used. As the alphabet throughout the ancient world, words were often run together without division. However, not infrequently in inscriptions a vertical line, and in manuscripts a single, double and this practice was found in Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and continues today with Ethiopic, though there whitespace is gaining ground. The early alphabetic writing systems, such as the Phoenician alphabet, had only signs for consonants, without some form of visible word dividers, parsing a text into its separate words would have been a puzzle. With the introduction of letters representing vowels in the Greek alphabet, the interpunct died out in Latin only after the Classic period, sometime around the year 200 CE, as the Greek style of scriptio continua became fashionable. In the 7th century Irish monks started using blank spaces, by the 8th or 9th century spacing was being used fairly consistently across Europe. Alphabetic writing without inter-word separation, known as scriptio continua, was used in Ancient Egyptian and it appeared in Post-classical Latin after several centuries of the use of the interpunct. Traditionally, scriptio continua was used for the Indic alphabets of South and Southeast Asia and hangul of Korea, today Chinese and Japanese are the main scripts consistently written without punctuation to separate words. In Classical Chinese, a word and a character were almost the same thing, space is the most common word divider, especially in Latin script. Ancient inscribed and cuneiform scripts such as Anatolian hieroglyphs frequently used short vertical lines to separate words, in manuscripts, vertical lines were more commonly used for larger breaks, equivalent to the Latin comma and period. This was the case for Biblical Hebrew and continues with many Indic scripts today, as noted above, the single and double interpunct were used in manuscripts throughout the ancient world. For example, Ethiopic inscriptions used a line, whereas manuscripts used double dots resembling a colon. The latter practice continues today, though the space is making inroads, Classical Latin used the interpunct in both paper manuscripts and stone inscriptions. Ancient Greek orthography used two and five dots as word separators, as well as the hypodiastole. In the modern Hebrew and Arabic alphabets, some letters have distinct forms at the ends and/or beginnings of words and this demarcation is used in addition to spacing

10.
Interpunct
–
It appears in a variety of uses in some modern languages and is present in Unicode as code point U+00B7 · Middle dot. The multiplication dot, whose glyphs are similar or identical to the interpunct, is a multiplication sign optionally used instead of the styled ×, the same sign is also used in vector multiplication to discriminate between the scalar product and the vector cross product or exterior product. As a multiplication operator, it is encountered in symbols for compound units such as the newton-meter. The multiplication dot is a separate Unicode character, but is often replaced by the interpunct or bullet. Various dictionaries use the interpunct to indicate syllabification within a word with multiple syllables, there is also a separate Unicode character, U+2027 ‧ hyphenation point. In British typography, the dot is an interpunct used as the formal decimal point. Its use is advocated by laws and by academic circles such as the Cambridge University History Faculty Style Guide and is mandated by some UK-based academic journals such as The Lancet, the space dot may still be used frequently in handwriting, however. In the Shavian alphabet, interpuncts replace capitalization as the marker of proper nouns, the dot is placed at the beginning of a word. The flown dot is used in Catalan between two Ls in cases where each belongs to a syllable, for example cel·la, cell. This distinguishes such geminate Ls, which are pronounced, from double L, in situations where the flown dot is unavailable, periods or hyphens are frequently used as substitutes, but this is tolerated rather than encouraged. Historically, medieval Catalan also used the symbol ⟨·⟩ as a marker for certain elisions, much like the modern apostrophe, there is no separate keyboard layout for Catalan, the flown dot can be typed using Shift-3 in the Spanish layout. It appears in Unicode as the letters ⟨Ŀ⟩ and ⟨ŀ⟩, similarly, the larger bullet may be seen but is discouraged on aesthetic grounds. The preferred Unicode representation is ⟨l·⟩, the partition sign is used in Chinese to mark divisions in transliterated foreign words, particularly names. This is properly a full-width punctuation mark, although sometimes narrower forms are substituted for aesthetic reasons, in particular, the regular interpunct is more commonly used as a computer input, although Chinese-language fonts typically render this as full width. When the Chinese text is romanized, the sign is simply replaced by a standard space or other appropriate punctuation. Thus, William Shakespeare is signified as 威廉·莎士比亞 or 威廉·莎士比亚, George W. Bush as 喬治·W·布殊 or 乔治·W·布什, titles and other translated words are not similarly marked, Genghis Khan and Elizabeth II are simply 成吉思汗 and 伊利沙伯二世 or 伊麗莎白二世 without a partition sign. The partition sign is used to separate book and chapter titles when they are mentioned consecutively, book first. It also appears in Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgrens works, where an interpunct is used to represent the stop in his reconstruction of medieval Chinese

11.
Typography
–
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing, and letter-spacing, the term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography, most typographers do not design typefaces, Typography also may be used as a decorative device, unrelated to communication of information. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation, as the capability to create typography has become ubiquitous, the application of principles and best practices developed over generations of skilled workers and professionals has diminished. Babylonian cylinder seals were used to create an impression on a surface by rolling the seal on wet clay, Typography also was implemented in the Phaistos Disc, an enigmatic Minoan printed item from Crete, which dates to between 1850 and 1600 B. C. It has been proposed that Roman lead pipe inscriptions were created with movable type printing, the essential criterion of type identity was met by medieval print artifacts such as the Latin Pruefening Abbey inscription of 1119 that was created by the same technique as the Phaistos Disc. The silver altarpiece of patriarch Pellegrinus II in the cathedral of Cividale was printed with individual letter punches, apparently, the same printing technique may be found in tenth to twelfth century Byzantine reliquaries. Other early examples include individual letter tiles where the words are formed by assembling single letter tiles in the desired order, Typography with movable type was invented during the eleventh-century Song dynasty in China by Bi Sheng. His movable type system was manufactured from ceramic materials, and clay type printing continued to be practiced in China until the Qing Dynasty, wang Zhen was one of the pioneers of wooden movable type. Although the wooden type was more durable under the mechanical rigors of handling, repeated printing wore the character faces down, metal movable type was first invented in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty, approximately 1230. Hua Sui introduced bronze type printing to China in 1490 AD, the diffusion of both movable-type systems was limited and the technology did not spread beyond East and Central Asia, however. Modern lead-based movable type, along with the printing press, is most often attributed to the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg in 1439. His type pieces, made from an alloy, suited printing purposes so well that the alloy is still used today. Gutenberg developed specialized techniques for casting and combining cheap copies of letter punches in the vast quantities required to print multiple copies of texts and this technical breakthrough was instrumental in starting the Printing Revolution and the first book printed with lead-based movable type was the Gutenberg Bible. Rapidly advancing technology revolutionized typography in the twentieth century. During the 1960s some camera-ready typesetting could be produced in any office or workshop with stand-alone machines such as introduced by IBM. During the mid-1980s personal computers such as the Macintosh allowed type designers to create typefaces digitally using commercial graphic design software, Digital technology also enabled designers to create more experimental typefaces as well as the practical typefaces of traditional typography. Designs for typefaces could be created faster with the new technology, the cost for developing typefaces was drastically lowered, becoming widely available to the masses

12.
Ampersand
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The ampersand is the logogram &, representing the conjunction word and. It originated as a ligature of the et, Latin for. The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase and per se &, meaning and intrinsically the word, traditionally, when reciting the alphabet in English-speaking schools, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself was repeated with the Latin expression per se. This habit was useful in spelling where a word or syllable was repeated after spelling, e. g. d, o, g—dog would be clear but simply saying a—a would be confusing without the clarifying per se added. It was also common practice to add the & sign at the end of the alphabet as if it were the 27th letter, pronounced as the Latin et or later in English as and. As a result, the recitation of the alphabet would end in X, Y, Z and this last phrase was routinely slurred to ampersand and the term had entered common English usage by 1837. Through popular etymology, it has been claimed that André-Marie Ampère used the symbol in his widely read publications. The ampersand can be traced back to the 1st century A. D. during the following development of the Latin script that led up to the Carolingian minuscule the use of ligatures in general diminished. The et-ligature, however, continued to be used and gradually became more stylized, the modern italic type ampersand is a kind of et ligature that goes back to the cursive scripts developed during the Renaissance. After the advent of printing in Europe in 1455, printers made extensive use of both the italic and Roman ampersands, since the ampersands roots go back to Roman times, many languages that use a variation of the Latin alphabet make use of it. The ampersand often appeared as a letter at the end of the Latin alphabet, similarly, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, as used by children. An example may be seen in M. B, moores 1863 book The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks. The popular Apple Pie ABC finishes with the lines X, Y, Z, the ampersand should not be confused with the Tironian et, which is a symbol similar to the numeral 7. Both symbols have their roots in the antiquity, and both signs were used up through the Middle Ages as a representation for the Latin word et. However, while the ampersand was in origin a common ligature in the everyday script, the Tironian et is found in old Irish language script, a Latin-based script generally only used for decorative purposes today, where it signifies agus in Irish. This symbol may have entered the language by way of monastic influence in the time of the early Christian church in Ireland. In everyday handwriting, the ampersand is sometimes simplified in design as a large lowercase epsilon or a backwards numeral 3 superimposed by a vertical line. The ampersand is also shown as a backwards 3 with a vertical line above and below it or a dot above

13.
Asterisk
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An asterisk is a typographical symbol or glyph. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star, computer scientists and mathematicians often vocalize it as star. In English, an asterisk is usually five-pointed in sans-serif typefaces, six-pointed in serif typefaces and it can be used as censorship. It is also used on the Internet to correct ones spelling, the asterisk is derived from the need of the printers of family trees in feudal times for a symbol to indicate date of birth. The original shape was seven-armed, each arm like a shooting from the center. In computer science, the asterisk is used as a wildcard character, or to denote pointers, repetition. Origin Adamantius is known to have used the asteriskos to mark missing Hebrew lines from his Hexapla. The asterisk evolved in shape over time, but its meaning as a used to correct defects remained. In the Middle Ages, the asterisk was used to emphasize a part of text. However, an asterisk was not always used, one hypothesis to the origin of the asterisk is that it stems from the five thousand year old Sumerian character dingir,

14.
At sign
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The at sign, @, normally read aloud as at, also commonly called the at symbol or commercial at, was originally an accounting and commercial invoice abbreviation meaning at a rate of. In contemporary use, the at sign is most commonly used in email addresses and it is now universally included on computer keyboards. The mark is encoded as U+0040 @ Commercial AT, the earliest yet discovered reference to the @ symbol is a religious one, it features in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle written by Constantinos Manasses in 1345. Held today in the Vatican Apostolic Library, it features the @ symbol in place of the letter alpha A in the word Amen. Why it was used in context is still a mystery. In terms of the character of the at sign, there are several theories pending verification. One theory is that the developed as a mercantile shorthand symbol of each at. For example, the cost of 12 apples @ $1 would be $12, whereas the cost of 12 apples at $1 would be $1, another theory is that medieval monks abbreviated the Latin word ad next to a numeral. One reason for the abbreviation saving space and ink, a theory concerning this graphic puts forward the idea that the form derives from the Latin word ad, using the older form of lower case d, ∂, which persists as the partial derivative symbol. It has been theorized that it was originally an abbreviation of the Greek preposition ανά, meaning at the rate of or per. It is also used like this in Modern French, Swedish or Czech, in view, the at-symbol is a stylised form of à. The compromise between @ and à in French handwriting is found in street market signs, an Italian academic claims to have traced the @ symbol to the 16th century, in a mercantile document sent by Florentine Francesco Lapi from Seville to Rome on May 4,1536. The document is about commerce with Pizarro, in particular the price of an @ of wine in Peru, in Italian, the symbol was interpreted to mean amphora. Currently, the word means both the at-symbol and a unit of weight. Until now the first historical document containing a symbol resembling a @ as a one is the Spanish Taula de Ariza. Even though the oldest fully developed modern @ sign is the one found on the above-mentioned Florentine letter, in contemporary English usage, @ is a commercial symbol, called at site or at rate meaning at and at the rate of. It has rarely used in financial documents or grocers price tags. Since 23 October 2012, the At-sign is registered as a mark by the German Patent

15.
Dagger (typography)
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A dagger or obelisk is a typographical symbol usually used to indicate a footnote if an asterisk has already been used. It is present in Unicode as U+2020 † dagger, the term obelisk derives from the Greek ὀβελίσκος, which means little obelus, from ὀβελός meaning roasting spit. It was originally represented by the subtraction and division symbols by Ancient Greek scholars as critical marks in manuscripts, a double dagger or diesis is a variant with two handles that is usually used for a third footnote after the asterisk and dagger. In Unicode, it is encoded as U+2021 ‡ double dagger, the triple dagger, a variant with three handles, was accepted by the Unicode Technical Committee in 2016. The dagger symbol originated from a variant of the obelus, originally depicted by a line or a line with one or two dots. It represented an iron roasting spit, a dart, or the end of a javelin. The obelus is believed to have been invented by the Homeric scholar Zenodotus as one of a system of editorial symbols and they were used to mark questionable or corrupt words or passages in manuscripts of the Homeric epics. While the asterisk was used for additions, the obelus was used for corrective deletions of invalid reconstructions. It was used when non-attested words are reconstructed for the sake of argument only and they were used to indicate the end of a marked passage. It was used much in the way by later scholars to mark differences between various translations or versions of the Bible and other manuscripts. The early Christian Alexandrian scholar Origen used it as a method of indicating differences between different versions of the Old Testament in his Hexapla, epiphanius of Salamis used both a horizontal slash or hook and an upright and slightly slanting dagger to represent an obelus. St. Jerome used a horizontal slash for an obelus. He describes the use of the asterisk and the dagger as, an asterisk makes a light shine, the obelus accompanied by points is used when we do not know whether a passage should be suppressed or not. Medieval scribes used the symbols extensively for critical markings of manuscripts, in addition to this, the dagger was also used in notations in early Christianity, to indicate a minor intermediate pause in the chanting of Psalms, equivalent to the quaver rest notation. It is also used to indicate a breath mark when reciting, along with the asterisk, in the sixteenth century, the printer and scholar Robert Estienne used it to mark differences in the words or passages between different printed versions of the Greek New Testament. The obelus was also used as a mathematical symbol for subtraction. It was first used as a symbol for division by the Swiss mathematician Johann Rahn in his book Teutsche Algebra in 1659 and this gave rise to the modern mathematical symbol ÷. Due to the variations as to the different uses of the different forms of obeli, the lemniscus and its variant, the hypolemniscus, is sometimes considered to be different from other obeli

16.
Ditto mark
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The ditto mark is a typographic symbol indicating that the word or figure above it are to be repeated. For example, The word ditto comes from the Tuscan language, the first recorded use of ditto with this meaning in English occurs in 1625. The graphical shape of the mark may vary according to different language uses. It is generally represented by a quotation mark pointing to the right, therefore, it would be ” in English, » in French, „ in German, and so on. The abbreviation do. is also used, iteration mark Dittography The dictionary definition of 〃 at Wiktionary

17.
Inverted question and exclamation marks
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They can also be combined in several ways to express the combination of a question and surprise or disbelief. The initial marks are normally mirrored at the end of the sentence or clause by the common used in most other languages. Unlike the ending marks, which are printed along the baseline of a sentence, inverted marks were originally recommended by the Real Academia Española in 1754, and adopted gradually over the next century. On computers, inverted marks are supported by various standards, including ISO-8859-1, Unicode and they can be entered directly on keyboards designed for Spanish-speaking countries, or via alternative methods on other keyboards. The inverted question mark is a punctuation mark written before the first letter of a sentence or clause to indicate that a question follows. It is a form of the standard symbol. Recognized by speakers of languages written with the Latin alphabet, in most languages, a single question mark is used, and only at the end of an interrogative sentence, How old are you. This was once true of the Spanish language. g, the Real Academia also ordered the same inverted-symbol system for statements of exclamation, using the symbols ¡ and. This helps to recognize questions and exclamations in long sentences, are translated respectively as ¿Te gusta el verano. and Te gusta el verano. These new rules were adopted, there exist nineteenth-century books in which the writer does not use either opening symbol. Some writers omit the inverted question mark in the case of a short unambiguous question such as and this is the criterion in Catalan. Certain Catalan-language authorities, such as Joan Solà, insist that both the opening and closing question marks be used for clarity, some Spanish-language writers, among them Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, refuse to use the inverted question mark. It is common in Internet chat rooms and instant messaging now to use only the single, as an ending symbol for a question, since it saves typing time—using most keyboard layouts, it is easier to type the closing symbol than the opening, inverted symbol. Multiple closing symbols are used for emphasis, Por qué dices eso. instead of the standard ¿Por qué dices eso, some may also use the ending symbol for both beginning and ending, giving. Por qué dices eso. Unspoken uncertainty is expressed in writing with ¿. and surprise with ¡, in 1668, John Wilkins proposed using the inverted exclamation mark ¡ as a symbol at the end of a sentence to denote irony. He was one of many, including Desiderius Erasmus, who there was a need for such a punctuation mark. In both cases, the i in the named entity reference is an initialism for inverted. ¿ is available in all keyboard layouts for Spanish-speaking countries, Windows users with a US keyboard layout are able to switch to the US-International layout. Among other changes, this converts the Alt key to the right of the bar into the Alt-Gr key

18.
Obelus
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An obelus is a symbol consisting of a short horizontal line with a dot above and below, and in other uses it is a symbol resembling a small dagger. In mathematics it is used to represent the mathematical operation of division. It is therefore called the division sign. Division may also be indicated by a line or a slash. In ISO 80000-2-9.6 it says, The symbol ÷ should not be used. In editing texts an obelus takes the form of a mark and is used as a reference mark, or to indicate that a person is deceased. In mathematics, the symbol has also been used to represent subtraction in Northern Europe. The word obelus comes from ὀβελός, the Ancient Greek word for a stick, spit. This is the root as that of the word obelisk. Originally this sign was used in ancient manuscripts to mark passages that were suspected of being corrupted or spurious, the dagger symbol, also called an obelisk, is derived from the obelus and continues to be used for this purpose. The incident of the Bloody Sweat in Gethsemane and the saying Father forgive them, although previously used for subtraction, the obelus was first used as a symbol for division in 1659 in the algebra book Teutsche Algebra by Johann Rahn. Some think that John Pell, who edited the book, may have been responsible for use of the symbol. The usage of the obelus to represent subtraction continued in parts of Europe. Other symbols for division include the slash or solidus, and the fraction bar, in Microsoft Windows, the obelus is produced with Alt+0247 on the number pad or by pressing Alt Gr+⇧ Shift++ when an appropriate keyboard layout is in use. In classic Mac OS and macOS, it is produced with ⌥ Option+/, on UNIX-based systems using Screen or X with a Compose key enabled, it can be produced by composing, and -, though this is locale- and setting-dependent. It may also be input by Unicode code-point on GTK-based applications by pressing Control+⇧ Shift+U, followed by the codepoint in hexadecimal, in the Unicode character set, the obelus is known as the division sign and has the code point U+00F7. In HTML, it can be encoded as &divide, or &#xF7, in LaTeX, the obelus is obtained by \div. Commercial minus sign, ⁒, which resembles a tilted obelus Jeff Miller, Earliest Uses of Various Mathematical Symbols Michael Quinion

19.
Multiplication sign
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The multiplication sign, also known as the times sign or the dimension sign is the symbol ×. While similar to the letter x, the form is properly a rotationally symmetric saltire. However, the communication of these names with a standard non-multiplication x is common when the actual × symbol is not readily available. The multiplication sign is used by historians for an event between two dates. When employed between two dates, for example 1225 and 1232, 1225×1232 means no earlier than 1225 and no later than 1232 and it can also be used in a date range, 1225×1232–1278. The multiplication sign, often attributed to William Oughtred, apparently had been in use since the mid 16th century. The letter x is used in place of the multiplication sign. This is considered incorrect in mathematical writing, in algebraic notation, widely used in mathematics, a multiplication symbol is usually omitted wherever it would not cause confusion, a multiplied by b can be written as ab or a b. Other symbols can also be used to denote multiplication, often to reduce confusion between the multiplication sign × and the commonly used variable x. In many non-Anglophone countries, rather than ×, the symbol for multiplication is U+22C5 ⋅ dot operator, for which the interpunct · may be substituted as a more accessible character. This symbol is used in mathematics wherever multiplication should be written explicitly, such as in ab = a⋅2 for b =2. In some languages and French the use of full stop as a multiplication symbol, in programming languages, the standard notation of multiplication operator is U+002A * Asterisk due to traditional restriction of all syntax of computer languages to the ASCII character repertoire. The × symbol is listed in the Latin-1 Supplement character set and is U+00D7 × MULTIPLICATION SIGN in Unicode and it can be invoked in various operating systems as per the table below. A monadic × symbol is used by the APL programming language to denote the sign function, there is a similar character ⨯ at U+2A2F, but this is not always considered identical to U+00D7, as U+2A2F is intended to explicitly denote the cross product of two vectors. Unicode Character VECTOR OR CROSS PRODUCT

20.
Percent sign
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The percent sign is the symbol used to indicate a percentage, a number or ratio as a fraction of 100. Related signs include the permille sign ‰ and the permyriad sign ‱, english style guides prescribe writing the number and percent sign without any space between. In Finnish, the percent sign is always spaced, and a case suffix can be attached to it using the colon, in French, the percent sign must be spaced with a non-breaking space. In Italian, the percent sign is never spaced, in Spanish, the percent sign must always be spaced now, as almost every other symbol. In traditional Russian typography, the percent sign is never spaced, but it is not that common in Russia today. In Chinese, the percent sign is almost never spaced, probably because Chinese does not use spaces to separate characters or words at all, according to the Swedish Language Council, the percent sign should be preceded by a space in Swedish, as all other units. In German, the space is prescribed by the body in the national standard DIN5008. In Persian and Turkish, the percent sign precedes rather than follows the number and it is often recommended that the percent sign only be used in tables and other places with space restrictions. In running text, it should be spelled out as percent or per cent, for example, not Sales increased by 24% over 2006, but rather Sales increased by 24 percent over 2006. Prior to 1425 there is no evidence of a special symbol being used for percentage. The Italian term per cento, for a hundred, was used as well as several different abbreviations, examples of this can be seen in the 1339 arithmetic text depicted below. The letter p with its crossed by a horizontal or diagonal strike conventionally stood for per, por, par, or pur in Mediaeval. At some point a scribe of some sort used the abbreviation pc with a loop or circle This appears in some additional pages of a 1425 text which were probably added around 1435. The pc with a loop eventually evolved into a fraction sign by 1650. In 1925 D. E. Smith wrote, The solidus form is modern, the ASCII code for the percent character is 37, or 0x25 in hexadecimal. Names for the percent sign include percent sign, mod, grapes, in the textual representation of URIs, a % immediately followed by a 2-digit hexadecimal number denotes an octet specifying a character that might otherwise not be allowed in URIs. In SQL, the percent sign is a character in LIKE expressions. In TeX and PostScript, a % denotes a line comment, in BASIC, a trailing % after a variable name marks it as an integer

21.
Per mille
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A per mille, also spelled per mil, per mill, permil, permill, or permille is a sign indicating parts per thousand. Per mil should not be confused with parts per million, the sign is written ‰, which looks like a percent sign with an extra zero in the divisor. It is included in the General Punctuation block of Unicode characters and it is accessible in Windows using ALT+0137. The term is common in other European languages where it is used in contexts, such as blood alcohol content. Examples of common use include, Legal limits of blood-alcohol content for driving a vehicle in some countries. Seawater salinity, for example, the salinity is 35‰

22.
Plus and minus signs
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The plus and minus signs are mathematical symbols used to represent the notions of positive and negative as well as the operations of addition and subtraction. Their use has extended to many other meanings, more or less analogous. Plus and minus are Latin terms meaning more and less, respectively, though the signs now seem as familiar as the alphabet or the Hindu-Arabic numerals, they are not of great antiquity. In Europe in the early 15th century the letters P and M were generally used, the symbols appeared for the first time in Luca Pacioli’s mathematics compendium, Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità, first printed and published in Venice in 1494. The + is a simplification of the Latin et, the − may be derived from a tilde written over m when used to indicate subtraction, or it may come from a shorthand version of the letter m itself. In his 1489 treatise Johannes Widmann referred to the symbols − and + as minus and mer, was − ist, das ist minus, und das + ist das mer. They werent used for addition and subtraction here, but to indicate surplus and deficit, the plus sign is a binary operator that indicates addition, as in 2 +3 =5. It can also serve as an operator that leaves its operand unchanged. This notation may be used when it is desired to emphasize the positiveness of a number, the plus sign can also indicate many other operations, depending on the mathematical system under consideration. Many algebraic structures have some operation which is called, or is equivalent to and it is conventional to use the plus sign to only denote commutative operations. Subtraction is the inverse of addition, directly in front of a number and when it is not a subtraction operator it means a negative number. For instance −5 is negative 5, a unary operator that acts as an instruction to replace the operand by its additive inverse. For example, if x is 3, then −x is −3, similarly, − is equal to 2. The above is a case of this. All three uses can be referred to as minus in everyday speech, further, some textbooks in the United States encourage −x to be read as the opposite of x or the additive inverse of x to avoid giving the impression that −x is necessarily negative. However, in programming languages and Microsoft Excel in particular, unary operators bind strongest, so in those cases −5^2 is 25. Some elementary teachers use raised plus and minus signs before numbers to show they are positive or negative numbers. For example, subtracting −5 from 3 might be read as positive three take away negative 5 and be shown as 3 − −5 becomes 3 +5 =8, in grading systems, the plus sign indicates a grade one level higher and the minus sign a grade lower

23.
Equals sign
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The equals sign or equality sign is a mathematical symbol used to indicate equality. It was invented in 1557 by Robert Recorde, in an equation, the equals sign is placed between two expressions that have the same value. In Unicode and ASCII, it is U+003D = equals sign, the etymology of the word equal is from the Latin word æqualis as meaning uniform, identical, or equal, from aequus. The = symbol that is now accepted in mathematics for equality was first recorded by Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde in The Whetstone of Witte. The original form of the symbol was much wider than the present form.2. Thynges, can be moare equalle. … to avoid the repetition of these words, is equal to, I will set a pair of parallels, or Gemowe lines, of one length. According to Scotlands University of St Andrews History of Mathematics website, the symbol || was used by some and æ, from the Latin word aequalis meaning equal, was widely used into the 1700s. In mathematics, the sign can be used as a simple statement of fact in a specific case, or to create definitions, conditional statements. The first important computer programming language to use the sign was the original version of Fortran, FORTRAN I, designed in 1954. In Fortran, = serves as an assignment operator, X =2 sets the value of X to 2. This somewhat resembles the use of = in a definition, but with different semantics. For example, the assignment X = X +2 increases the value of X by 2, a rival programming-language usage was pioneered by the original version of ALGOL, which was designed in 1958 and implemented in 1960. ALGOL included a relational operator that tested for equality, allowing constructions like if x =2 with essentially the same meaning of = as the usage in mathematics. The equals sign was reserved for this usage, both usages have remained common in different programming languages into the early 21st century. As well as Fortran, = is used for assignment in such languages as C, Perl, Python, awk, but = is used for equality and not assignment in the Pascal family, Ada, Eiffel, APL, and other languages. A few languages, such as BASIC and PL/I, have used the sign to mean both assignment and equality, distinguished by context. However, in most languages where = has one of these meanings, a different character or, more often, following ALGOL, most languages that use = for equality use, = for assignment, although APL, with its special character set, uses a left-pointing arrow. Fortran did not have an equality operator until FORTRAN IV was released in 1962, the language B introduced the use of == with this meaning, which has been copied by its descendant C and most later languages where = means assignment

24.
Pilcrow
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The pilcrow, also called the paragraph mark, paragraph sign, paraph, alinea, or blind P, is a typographical character for individual paragraphs. It is present in Unicode as U+00B6 ¶ PILCROW SIGN, the pilcrow can be used as an indent for separate paragraphs or to designate a new paragraph in one long piece of copy, as Eric Gill did in his 1930s book, An Essay on Typography. The pilcrow was a type of rubrication used in the Middle Ages to mark a new train of thought, the pilcrow is usually drawn similar to a lowercase q reaching from descender to ascender height, the loop can be filled or unfilled. It may also be drawn with the bowl stretching further downwards, resembling a backwards D, the word pilcrow originates from the Greek word paragraphos. This was rendered in Old French as paragraphe and later changed to pelagraphe, the earliest reference of the modern pilcrow is in 1440 with the Middle English word pylcrafte. The first way to divide sentences into groups in Ancient Greek was the original paragraphos and this notation soon changed to the letter K which was an abbreviation for the Latin word kaput, which translates as head, i. e. it marks the head of a new thesis. Eventually, to mark a new section, the Latin word capitulum, which translates as head was used. In the 1100s, C had completely replaced K as the symbol for a new chapter, rubricators eventually added one or two vertical bars to the C to stylize it, the symbol was filled in with dark ink and eventually looked like the modern pilcrow. Scribes would often leave space before paragraphs to allow for rubricators to draw the pilcrow and this is how the indent before paragraphs was created. The pilcrow sign followed by a number indicates the number from the top of the page. It is rarely used when citing books or journal articles, in proofreading, it indicates that one paragraph should be split into two or more separate paragraphs. The proofreader inserts the pilcrow at the point where a new paragraph should begin, kings College, Cambridge uses this convention in the service booklet for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. This is analogous to the writing of these instructions in red in some rubrication conventions, online, it is used in some blogs and wikis to denote permalinks. The pilcrow is used in desktop publishing software such as word processors. It is also used as the icon on a button that shows or hides the pilcrow and similar hidden characters, including tabs, whitespace. In typing programs, it marks a return that one must type, the pilcrow symbol is available in the default hardware codepage 437 of IBM PCs at codepoint 20, sharing its position with the ASCII control code DC4. The pilcrow character was in the 1984 Multinational Character Set extension of ASCII at 0xB6, from where it was inherited by ISO/IEC 8859-1, the html entity is &para, introduced in HTML3.2. In LaTeX, the glyph is invoked by \P or \textpilcrow

25.
Prime (symbol)
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The prime symbol, double prime symbol, triple prime symbol, quadruple prime symbol etc. are used to designate units and for other purposes in mathematics, the sciences, linguistics and music. The prime symbol is similar to the Hebrew geresh, but in modern fonts the geresh is designed to be aligned with the Hebrew letters. The prime symbol is used to represent feet, arcminutes. However, for convenience, a is commonly used, the double prime represents inches, arcseconds, and seconds. However, for convenience, a is commonly used, thus, 3′ 5″ could mean 3 feet and 5 inches or 3 minutes and 5 seconds. As an angular measurement, 3° 5′ 30″ means 3 degrees,5 arcminutes and 30 arcseconds, the triple prime in watchmaking represents a ligne. It is also found in historical astronomical works to denote thirds. Likewise, a quadruple prime denotes fourths, in mathematics, the prime is generally used to generate more variable names for things which are similar, without resorting to subscripts – x′ generally means something related to or derived from x. For example, if a point is represented by the Cartesian coordinates, the prime symbol is not related to prime numbers. Likewise are f ‴ and f ⁗, similarly, if y = f then y′ and y″ are the first and second derivatives of y with respect to x. Set complement, A′ is the complement of the set A, the negation of an event in probability theory, Pr =1 − Pr. The result of a transformation, Tx = x′ The transpose of a matrix, the prime is said to decorate the letter to which it applies. The same convention is adopted in functional programming, particularly in Haskell, in physics, the prime is used to denote variables after an event. For example, vA′ would indicate the velocity of object A after an event and it is also commonly used in relativity, The event at in frame S has coordinates in frame S′. In chemistry, it is used to distinguish between different functional groups connected to an atom in a molecule, such as R and R′, representing different alkyl groups in an organic compound. The carbonyl carbon in proteins is denoted as C′, which distinguishes it from the backbone carbon, the alpha carbon. In molecular biology, the prime is used to denote the positions of carbon on a ring of deoxyribose or ribose, the prime distinguishes places on these two chemicals, rather than places on other parts of DNA or RNA, like phosphate groups or nucleic acids. The chemistry of this demands that the 3 prime OH is extended by DNA synthesis

26.
Tilde
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The tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in came from the Latin titulus. The reason for the name was that it was written over a letter as a scribal abbreviation, as a mark of suspension. Thus the commonly used words Anno Domini were frequently abbreviated to Ao Dñi, such a mark could denote the omission of one letter or several letters. This saved on the expense of the labour and the cost of vellum. Medieval European charters written in Latin are largely made up of such abbreviated words with suspension marks and other abbreviations, the tilde has since been applied to a number of other uses as a diacritic mark or a character in its own right. These are encoded in Unicode at U+0303 ◌̃ Combining Tilde and U+007E ~ Tilde, in lexicography, the latter kind of tilde and the swung dash are used in dictionaries to indicate the omission of the entry word. This symbol informally means approximately, about, or around, such as ~30 minutes before and it can mean similar to, including of the same order of magnitude as, such as, x ~ y meaning that x and y are of the same order of magnitude. The tilde is used to indicate equal to or approximately equal to by placing it over the = symbol, like so. The text of the Domesday Book of 1086, relating for example, the text with abbreviations expanded is as follows, Mollande tempore regis Edwardi geldabat pro iiii hidis et uno ferling. In dominio sunt iii carucae et x servi et xxx villani et xx bordarii cum xvi carucis, ibi xii acrae prati et xv acrae silvae. Pastura iii leugae in longitudine et latitudine, elwardus tenebat tempore regis Edwardi pro manerio et geldabat pro dimidia hida. Ibi sunt v villani cum i servo, valet xx solidos ad pensam et arsuram. Eidem manerio est injuste adjuncta Nimete et valet xv solidos, ipsi manerio pertinet tercius denarius de Hundredis Nortmoltone et Badentone et Brantone et tercium animal pasturae morarum. The incorporation of the tilde into ASCII is a result of its appearance as a distinct character on mechanical typewriters in the late nineteenth century. Any good typewriter store had a catalog of alternative keyboards that could be specified for machines ordered from the factory, at that time, the tilde was used only in Spanish and Portuguese typewriters. In Modern Spanish, the tilde is used only with n and N, both were conveniently assigned to a single mechanical typebar, which sacrificed a key that was felt to be less important, usually the 1⁄2— 1⁄4 key. Portuguese, however, uses not ñ but nh and it uses the tilde on the vowels a and o

27.
Vertical bar
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The vertical bar is a computer character and glyph with various uses in mathematics, computing, and typography. It has many names, often related to particular meanings, Sheffer stroke, verti-bar, vbar, stick, broken bar, vertical line, vertical slash, bar, glidus, obelisk, or pipe. The vertical bar is used as a symbol in absolute value, | x |, read the absolute value of x. set-builder notation. Often a colon, is used instead of a vertical bar, sometimes a vertical bar following a function, with sub- and super-script limits a and b is used when evaluating definite integrals to mean f from a to b, or f-f. A vertical bar can be used to separate variables from fixed parameters in a function, examples, | ψ ⟩, The quantum physical state ψ. ⟨ ψ |, The dual state corresponding to the state above, ⟨ ψ | ρ ⟩, The inner product of states ψ and ρ. A pipe is a communication mechanism originating in Unix, which allows the output of one process to be used as input to another. In this way, a series of commands can be piped together, in most Unix shells, this is represented by the vertical bar character. For example, grep -i blair filename. log | more where the output from the process is piped to the more process. The same pipe feature is found in later versions of DOS. This usage has led to the character itself being called pipe, in many programming languages, the vertical bar is used to designate the logic operation or, either bitwise or or logical or. Specifically, in C and other languages following C syntax conventions, such as C++, Perl, Java and C#, since the character was originally not available in all code pages and keyboard layouts, ANSI C can transcribe it in form of the trigraph. Which, outside string literals, is equivalent to the | character, in regular expression syntax, the vertical bar again indicates logical or. For example, the Unix command grep -E fu|bar matches lines containing fu or bar, the double vertical bar operator || denotes string concatenation in PL/I, standard ANSI SQL, and theoretical computer science. Although not as common as commas or tabs, the bar can be used as a delimiter in a flat file. Examples of a standard data format are LEDES 1998B and HL7. It is frequently used because vertical bars are typically uncommon in the data itself, similarly, the vertical bar may see use as a delimiter for regular expression operations. This is useful when the expression contains instances of the more common forward slash delimiter

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Intellectual property
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Intellectual property refers to creations of the intellect for which a monopoly is assigned to designated owners by law. Intellectual property rights are the protections granted to the creators of IP, and include trademarks, copyright, patents, industrial design rights, and in some jurisdictions trade secrets. Artistic works including music and literature, as well as discoveries, inventions, words, phrases, symbols, the Statute of Monopolies and the British Statute of Anne are seen as the origins of patent law and copyright respectively, firmly establishing the concept of intellectual property. The first known use of the intellectual property dates to 1769. The first clear example of modern usage goes back as early as 1808, the German equivalent was used with the founding of the North German Confederation whose constitution granted legislative power over the protection of intellectual property to the confederation. According to Lemley, it was only at point that the term really began to be used in the United States. The history of patents does not begin with inventions, but rather with royal grants by Queen Elizabeth I for monopoly privileges, the evolution of patents from royal prerogative to common-law doctrine. The term can be used in an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown. The statement that discoveries are. property goes back earlier, in Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned propriété intellectuelle in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846. Until recently, the purpose of property law was to give as little protection as possible in order to encourage innovation. Historically, therefore, they were granted only when they were necessary to encourage invention, limited in time, the concepts origins can potentially be traced back further. In 500 BCE, the government of the Greek state of Sybaris offered one years patent to all who should discover any new refinement in luxury. Intellectual property rights include patents, copyright, industrial design rights, trademarks, plant variety rights, trade dress, geographical indications, a copyright gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time. Copyright may apply to a range of creative, intellectual, or artistic forms. Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed, an industrial design right protects the visual design of objects that are not purely utilitarian. An industrial design consists of the creation of a shape, configuration or composition of pattern or color, or combination of pattern, an industrial design can be a two- or three-dimensional pattern used to produce a product, industrial commodity or handicraft. Plant breeders rights or plant variety rights are the rights to use a new variety of a plant. The variety must amongst others be novel and distinct and for registration the evaluation of propagating material of the variety is examined, a trademark is a recognizable sign, design or expression which distinguishes products or services of a particular trader from the similar products or services of other traders

Pound (mass)
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The pound or pound-mass is a unit of mass used in the imperial, United States customary and other systems of measurement. The international standard symbol for the pound is lb. The unit is descended from the Roman libra, the English word pound is cognate with, among others, German Pfund, Dutch pond, and Swedish pund. All ultimately derive from a bo

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Various historic pounds from a German textbook dated 1848

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The Tower Pound

Apostrophe
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The apostrophe character is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English it is used for several purposes, The marking of the omission of one or more letters, the marking of plurals of individual characters. Apostrophe comes ultimately from Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος, thr

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Sign to Green Craigs housing development

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A sign diverting passengers to a temporary taxi rank at Leeds railway station, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom, with the extraneous apostrophe crossed out by an unknown copy editor.

Bracket
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A bracket is a tall punctuation mark typically used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. The matched pair may be described as opening and closing, or left, forms include round, square, curly, and angle brackets, and various other pairs of symbols. Chevrons were the earliest type of bracket to appear in written English

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Move up

Dash
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The dash is a punctuation mark that is similar to a hyphen or minus sign, but differs from both of these symbols primarily in length and function. Glitter, felt, yarn, and buttons—his kitchen looked as if a clown had exploded, a flock of sparrows—some of them juveniles—alighted and sang. The en dash indicates spans or differentiation, where it may

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These comparisons of the hyphen (-), en dash (–), and em dash (—), in various 12-point fonts, illustrate the typical relationship between lengths ("- n – m —"). In some fonts, the en dash is not much longer than the hyphen, and in Lucida Grande, the en dash is actually shorter than the hyphen (making this default Safari browser font typographically nonstandard).

Exclamation mark
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The exclamation mark or exclamation point is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or high volume, and often marks the end of a sentence. Similarly, an exclamation mark is often used in warning signs. Other uses include, In mathematics it denotes the factorial operation, at the beginning of

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Trilingual billboard in Barcelona (detail), showing the initial exclamation mark for Spanish, but not for Catalan (top line) and English.

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Warning signs are often an exclamation point enclosed within a triangle

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This Action Comics cover from 1959 ends every sentence with an exclamation point or question mark. Often, few or no periods would be used in the entire book.

Question mark
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The question mark is a punctuation mark that indicates an interrogative clause or phrase in many languages. The question mark is not used for indirect questions, the question mark glyph is also often used in place of missing or unknown data. In Unicode, it is encoded at U+003F, lynne Truss attributes an early form of the modern question mark in wes

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One possible origin of the question mark from Latin.

Quotation mark
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The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same character. Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media, the double quotation mark is older than the single. By the middle sixteenth century, printers had developed a form of this notation. In most o

Semicolon
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The semicolon or semi-colon is a punctuation mark that separates major sentence elements. A semicolon can be used two closely related independent clauses, provided they are not already joined by a coordinating conjunction. Semicolons can also be used in place of commas to separate items in a list, the first printed semicolon was the work of the Ita

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The frequency of semicolons in English texts from 1500–2008

Word divider
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In punctuation, a word divider is a glyph that separates written words. However, many languages of East Asia are written without word separation, in character encoding, word segmentation depends on which characters are defined as word dividers. In Ancient Egyptian, determinatives may have used as much to demarcate word boundaries as to disambiguate

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The Ethiopic double interpunct

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Traditional spacing examples from the 1911 Chicago Manual of Style

Interpunct
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It appears in a variety of uses in some modern languages and is present in Unicode as code point U+00B7 · Middle dot. The multiplication dot, whose glyphs are similar or identical to the interpunct, is a multiplication sign optionally used instead of the styled ×, the same sign is also used in vector multiplication to discriminate between the scala

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Billboard in Barcelona (detail)

Typography
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Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing, and letter-spacing, the term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and

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Movable type being assembled on a composing stick using pieces that are stored in the type case shown below it

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A specimen sheet of the Trajan typeface, which is based on the letter forms of capitalis monumentalis or Roman square capitals used for the inscription at the base of Trajan's Column, from which the typeface takes its name

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A sixteenth century workshop in Germany showing a printing press and many of the activities involved in the process of printing

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A specimen sheet by William Caslon shows printed examples of Roman typefaces

Ampersand
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The ampersand is the logogram &, representing the conjunction word and. It originated as a ligature of the et, Latin for. The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase and per se &, meaning and intrinsically the word, traditionally, when reciting the alphabet in English-speaking schools, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself was

Asterisk
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An asterisk is a typographical symbol or glyph. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star, computer scientists and mathematicians often vocalize it as star. In English, an asterisk is usually five-pointed in sans-serif typefaces, six-pointed in serif typefaces and it can be used as censorship. It is also used on the Intern

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Asterisks used to illustrate a section break in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

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Ambulance in Lausanne

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World War I ambulance

At sign
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The at sign, @, normally read aloud as at, also commonly called the at symbol or commercial at, was originally an accounting and commercial invoice abbreviation meaning at a rate of. In contemporary use, the at sign is most commonly used in email addresses and it is now universally included on computer keyboards. The mark is encoded as U+0040 @ Com

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@ used to signify French " à " ("at") from a 1674 protocol from a Swedish court (Arboga rådhusrätt och magistrat)

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@ symbol used as the initial "a" for the "amin" (amen) formula in the Bulgarian translation of the Manasses Chronicle (c. 1345).

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The Aragonese @ symbol used in the 1448 "taula de Ariza" registry to denote a wheat shipment from Castile to the Kingdom of Aragon.

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@ on a DVK Soviet computer (c. 1984)

Dagger (typography)
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A dagger or obelisk is a typographical symbol usually used to indicate a footnote if an asterisk has already been used. It is present in Unicode as U+2020 † dagger, the term obelisk derives from the Greek ὀβελίσκος, which means little obelus, from ὀβελός meaning roasting spit. It was originally represented by the subtraction and division symbols by

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Three variants of obelus glyphs.

Ditto mark
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The ditto mark is a typographic symbol indicating that the word or figure above it are to be repeated. For example, The word ditto comes from the Tuscan language, the first recorded use of ditto with this meaning in English occurs in 1625. The graphical shape of the mark may vary according to different language uses. It is generally represented by

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An advertisement from 1833. The second item on the list can be read as "Prime American Pork, in barrels", while the third is "Prime American Pork, in Half barrels".

Inverted question and exclamation marks
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They can also be combined in several ways to express the combination of a question and surprise or disbelief. The initial marks are normally mirrored at the end of the sentence or clause by the common used in most other languages. Unlike the ending marks, which are printed along the baseline of a sentence, inverted marks were originally recommended

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The ¡ character is accessible using AltGr +1 on a modern US-International keyboard. It is also available using a standard US keyboard by switching to the US-International keyboard layout.

Obelus
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An obelus is a symbol consisting of a short horizontal line with a dot above and below, and in other uses it is a symbol resembling a small dagger. In mathematics it is used to represent the mathematical operation of division. It is therefore called the division sign. Division may also be indicated by a line or a slash. In ISO 80000-2-9.6 it says,

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Plus and minuses. The obelus—or division sign—used as a variant of the minus sign in an excerpt from an official Norwegian trading statement form called «Næringsoppgave 1» for the taxation year 2010.

Multiplication sign
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The multiplication sign, also known as the times sign or the dimension sign is the symbol ×. While similar to the letter x, the form is properly a rotationally symmetric saltire. However, the communication of these names with a standard non-multiplication x is common when the actual × symbol is not readily available. The multiplication sign is used

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The multiplication sign

Percent sign
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The percent sign is the symbol used to indicate a percentage, a number or ratio as a fraction of 100. Related signs include the permille sign ‰ and the permyriad sign ‱, english style guides prescribe writing the number and percent sign without any space between. In Finnish, the percent sign is always spaced, and a case suffix can be attached to it

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1339 arithmetic text in Rara Arithmetica pg. 437

Per mille
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A per mille, also spelled per mil, per mill, permil, permill, or permille is a sign indicating parts per thousand. Per mil should not be confused with parts per million, the sign is written ‰, which looks like a percent sign with an extra zero in the divisor. It is included in the General Punctuation block of Unicode characters and it is accessible

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A railroad distance and gradient sign in the Czech Republic. The 20‰ grade is equivalent to 2%.

Plus and minus signs
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The plus and minus signs are mathematical symbols used to represent the notions of positive and negative as well as the operations of addition and subtraction. Their use has extended to many other meanings, more or less analogous. Plus and minus are Latin terms meaning more and less, respectively, though the signs now seem as familiar as the alphab

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Plus, minus, and hyphen-minus.

Equals sign
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The equals sign or equality sign is a mathematical symbol used to indicate equality. It was invented in 1557 by Robert Recorde, in an equation, the equals sign is placed between two expressions that have the same value. In Unicode and ASCII, it is U+003D = equals sign, the etymology of the word equal is from the Latin word æqualis as meaning unifor

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Recorde's introduction of "="

Pilcrow
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The pilcrow, also called the paragraph mark, paragraph sign, paraph, alinea, or blind P, is a typographical character for individual paragraphs. It is present in Unicode as U+00B6 ¶ PILCROW SIGN, the pilcrow can be used as an indent for separate paragraphs or to designate a new paragraph in one long piece of copy, as Eric Gill did in his 1930s book

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Three short paragraphs on making gunpowder in the manuscript GNM 3227a (Germany, c. 1400); the first paragraph is marked with an early form of the pilcrow sign, the two following paragraphs are introduced with Item.

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Pilcrow signs in an excerpt from a page of Villanova, Rudimenta Grammaticæ, printed by Spindeler in 1500 in Valencia.

Prime (symbol)
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The prime symbol, double prime symbol, triple prime symbol, quadruple prime symbol etc. are used to designate units and for other purposes in mathematics, the sciences, linguistics and music. The prime symbol is similar to the Hebrew geresh, but in modern fonts the geresh is designed to be aligned with the Hebrew letters. The prime symbol is used t

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Prime, double prime and triple prime

Tilde
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The tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in came from the Latin titulus. The reason for the name was that it was written over a letter as a scribal abbreviation, as a mark of suspension. Thus the commonly used words Anno Domini were frequently abbreviated to Ao Dñi, such a mark could

Vertical bar
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The vertical bar is a computer character and glyph with various uses in mathematics, computing, and typography. It has many names, often related to particular meanings, Sheffer stroke, verti-bar, vbar, stick, broken bar, vertical line, vertical slash, bar, glidus, obelisk, or pipe. The vertical bar is used as a symbol in absolute value, | x |, read

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The code point 124 (7C hexadecimal) is occupied by a broken bar in a dot matrix printer of the late 1980s, which apparently lacks a solid vertical bar. Due to this, broken bar is also used for vertical line approximation. See the full picture (3,000 × 2,500 pixels).

Intellectual property
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Intellectual property refers to creations of the intellect for which a monopoly is assigned to designated owners by law. Intellectual property rights are the protections granted to the creators of IP, and include trademarks, copyright, patents, industrial design rights, and in some jurisdictions trade secrets. Artistic works including music and lit

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The Statute of Anne came into force in 1710

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Demonstration in Sweden in support of file sharing, 2006.

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"Copying is not theft!" badge with a character resembling Mickey Mouse in reference to the in popular culture rationale behind the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998

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RIAA representative Hilary Rosen testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the future of digital music (July 11, 2000)

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Use of spaces on genkō yōshi 1. 3 spaces before the title. 2. 1 space between the author's family name and given name; 1 space below. 3. Each new paragraph begins after a space. 4. Subheadings have 1 empty line before and after, and have 2 spaces above. 5. Punctuation marks normally occupy their own square, except when they occur at the bottom of a line, in which case they share a square with the last character of the line.

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Diagram showing differences in placement of punctuation marks in vertical and horizontal writing, in a sentence containing hiragana, katakana and kanji.

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Julius Caesar 's Commentarii de Bello Gallico is one of the most famous classical Latin texts of the Golden Age of Latin. The unvarnished, journalistic style of this patrician general has long been taught as a model of the urbane Latin officially spoken and written in the floruit of the Roman republic.

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William Caslon's 1734 Specimen sheet, some of which is set in the Caslon typeface.

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The History of Henry Esmond, a novel by Thackeray written as a fictional memoir. The first edition of 1852 was printed in Caslon type, then just coming back into fashion. The goal was to achieve a period feel appropriate to its early eighteenth-century setting.